laurie anderson - delusion

In 2010 - 2011 Laurie Anderson toured with her multimedia show called Delusion.

This tour followed the release of Homeland and some material - notably "Another Day In America" - was reused from this album, but most was new. Some of the material has now found its way onto her recent album Heart Of A Dog and it's prompted me to revisit a splendid, crystal clear audience recording from Hamburg in May 2011. 

As always with Laurie the material works on many levels. Ostensibly Delusion is a series of meditations on death, though it goes much further than that. The promo blurb says this –

Conceived as a series of short mystery plays, Delusion jump-cuts between the everyday and the mythic. Combining violin, electronic puppetry, music and visuals, Delusion is full of nuns, elves, golems, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead relatives and unmanned tankers. It tells its story in the colourful and poetic language that has become Anderson's trademark. Inspired by the breadth of Balzac, Ozu and Laurence Sterne, and employing a series of altered voices and imaginary guests, Anderson tells a complex story about longing, memory and identity. At the heart of Delusion is the pleasure of language and a terror that the world is made entirely of words.

Phew!

Well, the first piece concerns Laurie’s technique for pushing herself on the try new things, "a basic carrot before the donkey technique" she says, "until one day… the donkey died…" This piece, typically for Laurie, is both very funny, and then suddenly very shocking. The audience laughs and then all too often stops laughing abruptly when the full meaning of what she's said suddenly sinks in. 

A little further on and another recitation begins, “I was standing in the room…” and relates the touching story of an old lady at the moment of her death. She's surrounded by her family and friends, but the old lady is talking to the animals… on the ceiling… and Laurie relates this tale of the delusional lady in her usual… calm…. voice and the narrative contains those… unusual…. pauses that punctuate Laurie’s stories. There is such a beautiful violin underscoring the narrative, that the strange text becomes incredibly moving. Really stunning stuff.

In fact most of Delusion is surprisingly emotional. Not sure why I am surprised. I suppose I think of Laurie Anderson as more of a clever manipulator of words and sounds than I do as an emotional songwriter and lyricist. But although Laurie's work can sometimes appear detached, a little cold on the surface, there's always a deeply emotional core.

Throughout Delusion there are bizarre excursions into Laurie’s dreams (where apparently it’s always raining) - in one she is served penguin in a restaurant, though it’s not clear if the penguin is actually dead yet… at another point she talks of an Icelandic farmer who is trying to rebuild a rotting barn so he can hold barn dances, but she’s more concerned with the fact that he can see elves… and there’s a frankly disturbing sequence where she believes she has given birth to her favourite dog, Lola-belle - this crops up on Heart Of A Dog too.  

Musically there’s loads of mournful and genuinely emotional violin / viola going on, really powerful pieces of music, multi-tracked and magnified. The deep voiced reassuring tones of the voice of authority, who Lou Reed had recently named as Fenway Bergamot, pops up on some pieces. But it’s the words in Laurie's own quiet voice that really hit home, somehow conveying real loss and hurt and confusion in those calm measured phrases.

And it’s fairly clear that, despite the promotional blurb, Delusion is pretty much all about Death - towards the end the dying old lady crops up again and, with a start, you realise that it’s Laurie’s own mother. It’s a shocking and terribly sad piece. Laurie has to rush to the hospital, and she doesn't know what to say to her dying mother. Not sure how true all of this is. And although I guess it’s all part of the act, part of the performance, Laurie herself seems to step out of that ultra calm… narrator voice, the one who leaves long… pauses… and she actually sounds genuinely worked up and frustrated and helpless and agitated, and it’s really quite a shock and the whole thing becomes desperately sad.

Immensely clever stuff, just Laurie, her simple instruments and the occasional voice of Fenway Bergamot and the result is 90 minutes of something that utterly transports you to somewhere else.

Really impressive.

Here’s an interesting interview from that time –

In Delusion, a new piece commissioned by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, musician, composer and multimedia artist Laurie Anderson will use mystery plays, photography, electronic puppetry and newly composed music to “explore mythic and everyday worlds.” Driven by her poetic use of language and inspired by everything from the mystic origins of the Russian space program to theories of time and speed, the show is set to be yet another in Anderson’s groundbreaking and envelope-pushing repertoire. (It also features a fictional historian and social commentator named Fenway Bergamot and his spotted dog.) Along with special musical guests Eyvind Kang and Colin Stetson, Delusion gets its world premiere February 16 at the Vancouver Playhouse.

Q: In an early description of Delusion, you talk about how language has the ability to both create and decreate the world. Can you tell me more about that?  

A: First of all, I’ve never talked about this thing [Delusion], and I haven’t finished it yet, (laughs). I haven’t found a way to finish it yet. There are a couple of things missing from the picture and I’m just starting to figure out what they are now. I began by writing a number of plays, two plays, in an attempt to get away from the voice I usually use. I wanted to bring some conflict into it. That was the beginning of trying to tell a story from a couple of different sides, which of course, in answer to your question, starts making you think, “What is the story?” The story is really the narrator or the writer. And when someone tells you a story, whether it’s Obama or your brother, you’re going to read the thing really differently. 

This is a whole series of interlocked stories and delusions. There are many, many different ways to tell them, and in many different types of voices. It’s not so much deconstructing the story as changing the voice in which they’re told. I’ve realized that the same exact words could be on a page and they could be in a live situation, or in a conversation, they could be the saddest thing you’ve ever heard, or really callous, or carefree. You can attach a whole lot of things to that.  

Q: Where did Fenway Bergamot come from? 

A: I don’t know quite how this voice, this filter, got a name. It is an "audio-drag” filter that I’ve used since 1978, when I first had to be a master of ceremonies at a [William S.] Burroughs event. I thought it would be fun to sound like a distracted old coot. Recently, it’s had a more melancholic ring to it, and I’ve been thinking that it almost sounds like a person. 

It was Lou [Reed] who decided to call this character Fenway Bergamot, and as soon as that filter had a name it was almost like I could do something different emotionally with that filter. It didn’t have to be just a joke. So I began to be able to use words in a different way with that instead of just being joke-y. I used to call it “the voice of authority” but now it doesn’t have much authority left. It frees me to use language in a more cut-up way. 

Q: In an old interview, you said you like to keep things simple, that you don’t want everything to get too complicated regardless of the whole multimedia aspect of your show. You seem to use such a complex mix of elements — your violin and puppetry and visuals. Do you think it’s easier to get at simple truths with complex methods? 

A: If I just minded my own advice… (laughs) Not necessarily. The only way to get there is to try to pay attention to them. Although I do have to say that one of the ways I tried to get to those things this time was through images. I sat for a long time looking at stuff and just listening to sounds. Not one single word. I thought, “I really enjoy this show. I really like it just like this,” and for awhile I was just going to have zero words. Then I thought, “Wait a second. I’ve never done that.” But it was really, really tempting. Now, in a way, I’m just trying to pare the words down even further, but some of them don’t like that. Some of them have to be the shaggy dog story they started out as. Paring them down, they become really silly. I’m in a bit of a dilemma right at the moment with some of this stuff. 

When you make something from absolutely nothing, there’s no template for it, and there’s no way to say that something isn’t what you wanted it to be, because that was just a vague idea. I’m not making shoes. I don’t know what I’m making. A lot of time I’ve started out to make one thing and I’ve ended up making something utterly different. I would begin writing a piece of music and it would become a drawing. I’m talking really different. I’m in a state of insecurity at the moment.

Q: Could that be why, when some people describe you, they use words like “innovator”? That you have this ability to bring things from nothing into existence? 

A: Everyone can do that if they want to. I’m convinced of that, that’s for sure. That everyone can’t is a bit of a myth, in the sense that absolutely everyone can sing. I think people are taught that they can’t do stuff way too early. I just wish we had a national music day like they do in France, when everybody sings and it doesn’t really matter if it’s not all in tune. That’s part of why I’m bothered that half of the things I do are amateur in a way, in a lot of ways. The animation I do is kind of amateur, the orchestration is pretty amateur, but I give them all a shot and I try not to worry that it doesn’t look very pro. 

Q: In a 2007 interview on Swedish television you asked a rhetorical question about if the world needs another multimedia show. Does it? 

A: Ha. Good question. At the time, I probably was going to do another one anyway. Needed or not, I might just have fun doing it. I don’t know… I wish I knew what the world needed. If I knew, I would try to contribute. But I have no idea what it needs, so I just try to think of something else that would be interesting to do.